Welcome new member

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dear CSDMS Member

Welcome to the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System. We thank you for having joined one or more of our dynamic groups.

An overarching goal of CSDMS and its primary funder, the U.S. National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov), is to encourage more open collaboration and cooperation within our modeling community. Working together we hope to make the Earth surface dynamics community more effective with less duplication of effort, more ways to connect models, and open source models that allow others to easily build upon them. Since July 2019, we have more than 1820 members from at least 70 countries. To get a better understanding of what CSDMS has accomplished so far, please browse our web site (https://csdms.colorado.edu). We also provide brief updates to our membership about every 6 months. Like you, I do not like getting too many emails, so our web site is always up to date. You can read my latest update letter at: https://csdms.colorado.edu/

The CSDMS Working Groups are: Terrestrial, Coastal, Marine, Education & Knowledge Transfer, and Cyberinformatics & Numerics. The CSDMS Focus Research Groups are: Hydrology, Carbonates and Biogenics, Chesapeake, Geodynamics, Critical Zone Human Dimensions, and Ecosystem Dynamics. The Initiatives are: Coastal Vulnerability and Continental Margin Initiative. Current information about these groups and your membership benefits are available at: https://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/CSDMS_groups.

Contributing to the model repository (https://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/Contribute_model) is key to our mission and highly supportive to the CSDMS community. We heartily thank the many individuals who have taken the time to submit their models along with their metadata, test cases, example input and output files – and ask you, as a member, to equally commit to this goal. This is so important to our effort, and your favorite funding managers are noting which members are fulfilling their requirement to make their models and modeling tools publicly available.

We are hoping that members will become familiar with the concept of ‘Initialize, Run, Finalize’ or IRF (https://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/Help:IRF_Interface) that is so important for component modeling. Examples can be found at https://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/How_To_IRF. If needed, please contact our software engineers: Eric Hutton or Mark Piper (email CSDMSsupport@colorado.edu) to ask to schedule individual help.

You will note that we provide our member modeling community with free access to, and a migration pathway toward high-performance computing. We have acquired a 704-core supercomputer from SGI (Intel quad-core 3GHz processors), with 2GB and some with 4GB of RAM per core, for a total of 1.8 TB RAM. This link provides more information about the HPCC (https://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/HPCC_information).

The groups are planning to meet in the fall of each year, often at the CSDMS Integration Facility located in Boulder, Colorado. More information will be provided to the members soon via the membership email lists. If you are interested to contribute your time and expertise to the goals and projects of a group, please contact its Chairperson for more detailed information about the next meeting. If you have any questions, you may additionally contact our Executive Assistant at: csdms@colorado.edu.

Again, we thank you for your membership, and look forward to your active participation in this exciting and important project.

All the best,

James P.M. Syvitski

Executive Director,

University of Colorado-Boulder

csdms@colorado.edu; 303-735-5482

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++